Floyd County Texas --
Residents and officials of this small Texas community are
concerned about the declining population experienced since the
1980 but even more concerned about the impact polygamist Samuel
Fischer’s family will have on their community.

Warren Jeffs’ followers plan to move
Fisher's Utah cabinet
making company, two wives and twenty four children to west Texas
and local residents are worried others will follow. Fischer’s
supporters claim the polygamist would bring as many as 100
much-needed jobs to the area but many here say Fischer is no
godsend, and the economic boost he promises the community is not
worth the cost.

Fischer is a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints, a renegade offshoot of the
Mormon
Church. The FLDS is ruled by their prophet, Warren Jeffs, who was
recently arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada, on warrants out of Arizona
and Utah on four total counts of Rape of a Child, stemming from
his practice of arranging child marriages to older men. Jeffs was
on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List and featured on America's Most
Wanted TV show.

In Lockney, people worry that Fischer is paving the way for
thousands of Jeffs’ followers now living in Utah and Arizona.
Fisher already has a contract on the Tye Company's
176,000-square-foot industrial complex that once produced farm
implements.

Now
Fisher is shopping for housing. He has closed on one house in
nearby Plainview (Hale County) and has contracts on three others
there. He is reported to be checking out the migrant labor camp
twelve miles away in Floydada. The camp, which was originally
subsidized by the U.S. government, contains accommodations for 156
family units in fourteen buildings.

Fischer’s company, Westwood Products, currently employs about 20 people
in Hildale Utah to make custom cabinets for high-end homes. He
says he will rename it Techsun when it moves to Texas.

When asked if FLDS members might follow him to Texas, Fischer
said he didn’t know. “I’m not here to pave the way,” he said. “I don’t know if any
of them will. I don’t know if a bunch of them will. . . . I am not
here to build a compound.”

In an extraordinary departure from the silence with which
members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day
Saints normally guard their lives and beliefs. Fischer spoke about
his life, his faith, his family and the reason he has two “ladies”
for about 90 minutes at a town meeting he requested last month.

Fisher
requested the meeting in a letter to the
Floyd County Hesperian
after it published a column about him and his association with Jeffs. The meeting was standing room only as concerned future
neighbors queried Fisher on his intentions for their community.
When pressed, Fischer told them that Jeffs was his spiritual
leader but that the FLDS does not have a stake in his business.
Those who attended the meeting in Lockney say Fischer, 53,
promised he would not build a compound. He also said he did not
know who would be living in the houses he will soon own.

When asked if he practiced polygamy, Fischer said “I don't
practice it, I live it”. He said he has two “ladies,” using the
preferred FLDS term for their legal and spiritual wives.

Fischer said he and his first wife had 13 children, including
two they adopted. He then “adopted” his second wife and her
then-nine children after her husband was ousted from the faith for
adultery. He now has 24 children, 12 of whom still live at home.

Many FLDS members like Fischer, are settling elsewhere after a
court takeover of properties in their historical home in Utah and
Arizona. Fischer said he is leaving Hildale because Utah
authorities took control of the sect’s scandal-plagued trust that
controls all the property in the two neighboring towns. Jeffs’
group — based in the adjacent towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado
City, Arizona — numbers about 10,000. Hildale, Utah, the community
associated with Jeffs. In 2005, a judge took control of the FLDS
Church's financial arm, the United Effort Plan Trust. The trust
controls nearly all the land in the polygamist enclaves in Hildale,
Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., and has assets estimated at more
than $100 million.

Hildale and Colorado City, separated by an imperceptible
state line, have been home to fundamentalist Mormons since the
1930s; the sect considers polygamy a religious tenet. The sect is
cloaked in secrecy and widely known for marrying off teenage
brides and banishing men and boys who disagree with Jeffs. The
Mormon Church renounced polygamy in 1890 and has disavowed any
connection to the sect.

Warren
Jeffs

Jeffs’ followers are already in Texas, living outside the small
town of Eldorado, about 230 miles south of Lockney. Three years
ago, a resident of Eldorado, Texas, showed up at a hastily
arranged press conference in the Schleicher County Sheriff’s
Office parking lot with a sign that read, “The Devil is Here.”

It
didn’t help that David Allred, the FLDS member who bought the
1,691-acre property on the small town’s outskirts, said it would
be used as a hunting preserve.

Instead, the FLDS has built a compound on the hillsides of
Eldorado in Schleicher County that some are calling Warren
Jeffs’ New World Headquarters. The city has large houses, a
concrete plant, and even its own waste-water treatment plant.

"They're building like crazy out here" says Randy Mankin with
the El Dorado Success Newspaper. Among the buildings erected by
the sect is an 80-foot tall, gleaming white temple. Commenting on
Fisher’s claim that he will use the Tye building in Floyd County
to produce furniture, Mankin said “it could be a cover story”.

Until a few weeks ago, few people in Floyd County had heard of
the FLDS church. Now, almost everyone in the rural county knows about the sect’s
peculiar practices - arranged marriages, exiled men and boys,
teenage brides - and its beleaguered prophet, Warren S. Jeffs, who
awaits trial on charges of rape as an accomplice for conducting an
unwanted marriage.

Floyd County is long on Christian faith but short on jobs, so
Fischer’s arrival has triggered both hope and despair. Some of
those who attended the meeting said Fischer didn’t seem
forthcoming.

"Multiple wives in Utah may be acceptable, but it's not here,"
Lockney Economic Development Corp. president Phil Cotham
told the Deseret Morning News. "We're part of the Bible Belt and
people are very serious about their faith around here."

Lockney shopkeeper
Ginger Mathis is suspicious. “He
wouldn’t be looking at houses if he didn’t have some others
coming,” she said.

“He didn’t tell us anything,” Mathis said. “He evaded some
(questions) and even the ones he answered I didn’t feel he was
being truthful.”

“All this is new to us,” said Warren Mathis the morning
after the meeting, sitting with three fellow farmers at the D&J
Gin office. “We don’t like it. We’ve lived over all this time and
we’ve been getting along fine without bringing all these people
into it.”

Alice Gilroy, editor of
The Floyd County Hesperian-Beacon
and member of the Lockney Economic Development Board said many
residents fear that if Lockney becomes known as an FLDS town, no
one else will want to move there.

"I have no idea how many families will move to the area, but I
do know that this business will not bring new jobs for local
people-not unless you happen to be a member of one of the FLDS
families", Gilroy said.

Dwight Thomason, the Coldwell Banker Realtor who will collect a
commission for brokering the sale of the Tye building disagrees.
He said Fischer’s plan for the property was “the best thing in the
world that’s happened to Lockney.” “He’s going to clean it up and
going to hire about 100 people, which is going to help the economy
of Lockney.”

Investigative reporters from the Fox News Network who were
in Floyd County last week are expected to explore the
polygamist's controversial move into Texas on Hannity's America.